Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Typography III Magazine Spread

Hey guys. So, I've kind of failed at updating my blog this month. Sorry about that. It's just that a lot of the work we've been doing in my studio classes has been long-term projects so I haven't had a lot to show you guys so far. I also have a couple older projects that I still need to blog about but I just haven't gotten around to it. So expect several posts over the next couple days.

For today, I'll be showing you guys my first project for Typography III. We had to redesign the table of contents and a food section spread for the New York Times Magazine. Here are my solutions (click for larger images):

I decided to use Avenir for the body text and Din for the headers. One thing I had to learn was to keep the body text fairly large even though it meant going onto a third page. However, as cute as tiny text is, it's not practical for older readers of the magazine. Also, since the recipes also have to be functional in the kitchen, I made the type size 12, much larger than I would otherwise.

When it came to the table of contents, I had a lot of fun just experimenting with type and the different ways it could be represented.

Above you can see one of my experiments, in which I tried to show each article a different way even though it became completely illegible. In the end, I decided to go with a very obvious grid, with the feature articles getting more space on the page. Also, I tried to make the page numbers very obvious since I always get annoyed when it's hard to tell which page number goes with which article. I chose not to use any imagery in order to put the emphasis on the typographic system I had set up.